Bremen’s Neustadt port aggressively pushes breakbulk cargo traffic

BremenInvest, the investment and business promoting agency of the North German city of Bremen, touts Bremen’s ports – a cluster of ports in Bremen and Bremerhaven together make up Bremenports - as the “region’s engine for trade and industry”, creating thousands of jobs in the handling of ships, transport and transshipment of goods, repairs, logistics and other services. The two ports handle a wide range of cargo: containers, bulk goods, automobiles, project cargo, and hazardous goods. The Port of Bremerhaven handles about 80% of the cargo, including containers.

After Antwerp, Bremen is the second most important transshipment hub in Europe for forestry products, steel products and machinery. Bremen’s Neustadt port is home to Europe’s largest terminal for breakbulk and heavy-lift cargo, providing more than a million square meters of warehouse space and outdoor storage, and ships. Neustadt Port, located on the left side of the Weser River, handles, primarily, breakbulk/project cargo, iron and steel products, forest products, etc.

“Non-containerized breakbulk cargo is shipped from the Neustadt port … the cargo includes steel products such as pipes, timber, machinery and machine parts, etc. Components for wind turbines and massive paper rolls for the paper industry are brought ashore here, though a small volume of containers also passes through Neustadt port. Its proximity to the Bremen Cargo Distribution Center means that goods do not have to be transported far,” says Rainer Schaefer, a senior manager with a logistics company near Hamburg.

The Neustadt port remains an important breakbulk hub in Europe, with a large volume of shipments destined for North America. According to Sven Riekers, the sales director at Neustadt Port, about 1.5 million tonnes of breakbulk cargo was handled by Neustadt Port in 2022. Furthermore, the so-called High & Heavy Terminal in Bremerhaven handled about 1.2 million tonnes (of equipment such as construction machines, buses, cranes, etc. as well as other breakbulk goods).

The terminals at Neustadt port have, meanwhile, specialized in the conventional handling of breakbulk cargo arriving on regular liner services and distributed from there to customers throughout Germany. Neustadt port also handles transshipment by floating crane of containers and heavy goods with unit weights of up to 650 tonnes. Increasingly, large components for onshore wind farms are also transshipped through the port, and natural gas liquefaction plants, which arrive in large individual parts in Neustadt port where they are assembled into finished plants, are loaded onto large ships or pontoons for onward transport.

Breakbulk Europe

Breakbulk Europe 2021, an important event for the project cargo and breakbulk industry, scheduled to take place in Bremen in 2021 was cancelled because of the COVID lockdown and other restrictions imposed on visitors. It had been held prior to that in Bremen; the 2022 edition was held in Rotterdam.

Nick Davison, Portfolio Director Breakbulk & CWIEME, Hyve Group PLC, had called the event, held in Bremen during the earlier two years, as “tremendously successful”. He stated that many new companies had benefited…